1. News of the Cross-Lingual Wiki Engine Project (CLWE)

There has been a flurry of activity around the CLWE project over the last couple of months. Here we go:

First useful version available

Louis-Philippe Huberdeau has been busily implementing features for collaborative translation in TikiWiki (with significant help from Alain Désilets, Sébastien Paquet, Xavier de Pedro, Nelson Ko and Marc Laporte). We are really happy with how it's turning out, and feel that this first version is already useful as is.

View a demonstration

Architecture document

An architecture to track changes across translations had to be created for the CLWE project. The architecture aims to allow concurrent modifications of any of the translated pages and track the changes and their propagation. The architecture does not attempt to control the content or to restrict it. However, it can be used to provide information about the state of the translation at any point in time.

Try it out and suggest improvements!

The CLWE code is open source, open content and open development. Are you part of one of the various wiki engine communities? Do you have a potential use case for wikis in translation? We want to hear from you! You can participate to make it better!

A workshop proposal on cross-language collaboration has been submitted to the 2008 International Symposium on Wikis, which will be held in Porto this September.

The goal of this workshop is to explore how wikis and the wiki way might impact, and be influenced by, multilingual collaboration and language work. It aims to bring together people with an interest in multilingual collaboration, as well as specialists such as translators and terminologists, and authors or organizations who hope to find ways for their material to reach other language communities.

The workshop invites full and short papers as well as position papers. Although the workshop still has to be formally accepted, we are pushing out the Call for Participation now to enable people to prepare contributions in time for the submission deadlines (papers: May 3rd; position papers: June 7th).

3. Marc Laporte to address UN and EU organisations at JIAMCATT

In February, CLWE project members met with Olaf-Michael Stefanov, a newly retired former senior officer in the United Nations (UN) translation department. Olaf indicated that many UN and European Union agencies are looking for ways to allow volunteers to collaboratively translate material.

Following this meeting, Marc Laporte has been invited to present the Cross Lingual Wiki Engine (CLWE) and TikiWiki at the upcoming International Annual Meeting on Computer-Assisted Translation and Terminology (JIAMCATT) in Tunis, 23-25 April.

JIAMCATT provides its partners with a forum for debate, exchange of expertise and cooperation in the fields of computer-assisted terminology and translation, interpretation and documentation retrieval. There will be approximately 150 participants, representing international organizations and European transnational bodies.

Marc will be giving a presentation as part of the "Content management systems (technical aspects)" session. He will also demonstrating TikiWiki, with its new multilingual features, page staging and approval, and general wiki/groupware functionality.

That's all for this edition of the Wiki-Translation newsletter. Thanks for reading!